After spending ten months studying at Tel Aviv University, Haisam Hassanein—an Egyptian—was asked to deliver an address at his graduation ceremony. Once video of his speech circulated on the Internet, he became subject to widespread condemnation in the Egyptian press. He responds:

In [my speech], I expressed a true genuine reflection on my . . . stay in Israel, where I interacted with all different kinds of people—Jews, Arabs, Druze, and Bedouin among them. And I talked about my first-hand observations of the day-to-day co-existence between different segments of people in Israeli society despite their conflicting histories and identities.

After the video went viral, I was gratified to see that the speech had been received positively not only by my classmates, but also by my friends in Israel and the United States, and most importantly, by ordinary people around the world. The Egyptian media, however, reacted quite differently—not by simply taking issue with the address, but often straying from constructive criticism and instead misquoting me and taking my words out of context. . . . [Some] articles . . . portrayed as paradoxical the very notion that an Egyptian could speak positively about his experience in Israel. . . .

I fully reject the notion that I betrayed Egypt simply by going to a country it made peace with 36 years ago in order to better understand it. To clarify, I did not make a political speech. I simply and honestly related the experience I had in Israel. Are we not allowed, as human beings, to have some measure of complexity? Can’t our curiosities carry us to places we never imagined? Are we strictly forbidden to learn about the other on our own terms?

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.